TRUSKAVETS, Ukraine — It was a strange sight: Dozens of men and women with green badges walking among relaxed holidaymakers in white bathrobes.
The badges said “School of Ze Lawmaker” to mark these people as participants in the first-ever mass training for newly-elected parliamentarians in Ukraine.
President Volodymyr Zelensky’s Servant of the People party convened all of its 254 newly elected lawmakers at the Truskavets mineral water resort, located 590 kilometers west of Kyiv, for a week-long training starting from July 29. Almost all of them came.
The party chose the most expensive 5-star hotel in the city, Rixos Prykarpattya, surrounded by green fields and forest, where the price for a double room with meals starts at $200 per night. They hired one of the country’s top business schools, the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE), to lead the training.
Unlike the vacationers, the lawmakers weren’t there to relax. KSE’s honorary president, Tymofiy Mylovanov, said that this course would be “real hardcore.” The party is yet to disclose how much it paid for this rapid-fire education.
The participants are as diverse as can be. There are top managers and the unemployed, university professors and people whose only degree is from high school.
The only common trait they have is that none of them have ever been in parliament before. Amid widespread demand for new faces in politics, that allowed them to defeat many political heavyweights in the July 21 snap parliamentary election.
Critics say it is impossible to create statesmen in one week. But Mylovanov calls their lack of political experience an advantage.
“This is good. You could bring a fresh eye to it,” he told the student-lawmakers during the morning session on July 29.
But the real challenge for the party will be to keep this motley group together. Most of them first met in Truskavets and have no unifying ideology beyond their leader Zelensky’s charisma and the urge to change the country.
Servant of the People will form the largest parliamentary faction in Ukraine’s history. But time will show if its members survive as one team. A critical worry is the bribes they might be offered by lobbyists to vote against the party line.
“We will have to work hard on team building,” said David Arakhamiya, 40, an IT businessman who is No. 4 on the party list and one of the candidates for head of the faction. “There are so many different people who have never worked together. We need to synchronize them.”
David Arakhamiya, an IT businessman who is No. 4 on the party list and one of the candidates for head of the faction of the Servant of the People party, talks by phone in Truskavetsk on July 29. (Oleg Petrasiuk)
Different students
Yuriy Mysiagin came early on July 29 and took his place at one of 29 round tables in a hotel’s largest conference hall, suitably named “Senator.” Mysiagin, 45, was elected from District 28 in Dnipro city, where he has traded furniture and, in 2014, organized a makeshift hospital for the soldiers wounded in Russia’s war against Ukraine.
Thanks to his volunteering, he met with Andriy Bohdan, who in 2014 advised then-local governor, oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, and now heads Zelensky’s office. It was Bohdan who invited Mysiagin to represent Zelensky’s party in the district in Dnipro.
Dmytro Razumkov, head of the Servant of the People party of President Volodymyr Zelensky, watches as the newly-elected lawmakers from his party discuss a task they received during a special training in Truskavets mineral water resort on July 29, 2019. (Oleg Petrasiuk)
Anna Kovalenko arrived a bit later and took a seat at the same table as Mysiagin. Kovalenko, 28, a defense expert, was elected as No. 35 on the party ticket. She advised three former defense ministers and helped in drafting laws as an advisor to the security and defense committee in parliament. She joined the party at the invitation of Dmytro Razumkov, a former political expert and party head.
While Kovalenko has a postgraduate degree in public administration, Mysiagin has no higher education. But they will both work on the security and defense committee in parliament just like other people sitting at table No. 20. All the tables have been arranged according to potential parliamentary committees.
“We will have very practical tasks on developing the strategy of the committee, drafting bills and defending them,” Kovalenko said.
She added that, for her, this training is more about the environment than education.
Intense schooling
During the first session on July 29 — the only one where journalists were allowed to attend — Mylovanov taught the future lawmakers about how to perceive and analyze information. He showed them different tricks for the brain, including how the markings on a road may distort the way drivers see it.
“If you don’t understand your cognitive distortion, you will make the wrong decision and the entire country will suffer from it,” he said.
The training includes six sessions each day. They start at 7:30 a. m. and end at 9:30 p. m., which Mylovanov compared to training “intellectual Navy SEALs.”
“We train them according to the model of a business school,” he told journalists. He said the hardest sessions would be on July 31 and Aug. 1, when his students would study different sectors of the economy.
The training also requires going to bed early and avoiding alcohol, said Arakhamiya, who sat at the same table as Mysiagin and Kovalenko. “We will probably be tired as hell,” he added.
Mysiagin admitted he was tired even after the first session.
“There’s a lot of information. And we’ll have to sit and listen to it for full days.”
But there are critics that call the seven-day training useless.
Former President Petro Poroshenko, who received a bitter defeat from Zelensky in the April presidential election, said in a recent interview with Ukrainska Pravda that it’s impossible to teach the new lawmakers anything other than to vote simultaneously in such a short time.
Poroshenko recalled the late Mykhailo Chechetov, a former lawmaker from the party of ousted President Viktor Yanukovych. His main role in parliament was to wave signals to lawmakers from his faction on whether they should vote for the bills.
Risks for unity
During the coffee break, participants in the training walked in small groups with their acquaintances and spoke to journalists, revealing how different they are.
Blogger and activist Sviatoslav Yurash, 23, who was No. 27 on the party list and who will be the youngest lawmaker in this parliament, spoke about Servant of the People’s ideology, which he described as libertarian. (Ruslan Stefanchuk, Zelensky’s representative to parliament and Servant of the People’s main ideologue, has previously described the party ideology is libertarian, although exactly what this means remains unclear.)
Greco-Roman wrestler Zhan Beleniuk, 28, elected as No. 10 on the party list, promised not to miss the parliamentary sessions — other than for the Summer Olympics in 2020 — and stressed that he would not use his wrestling skills for the brawls in parliament.
Oleksandr Skichko, 28, a parodist and actor who was elected in single-member District No. 197 in Cherkasy Oblast, said that in preparation for his new role he had stopped working with the Ukraina television channel, which belongs to Ukraine’s richest man, Rinat Akhmetov.
While speaking at the training, party leader Razumkov told its participants that they have yet to become politicians and that their political future depends on the future of the party.
“We are like a big car and each of you is a part of this car. It will not work without you. But you will also not be able to do anything without it,” he said.
Political technologist Mykyta Poturayev, 48, who was elected as No. 97 on the party list, went further and called his colleagues “political nobodies” during a speech on July 30, according to audio recording leaked to the media.
Speaking off the record, one top party member admitted that Servant of the People may have problems with its lawmakers switching parties — a long-standing tendency in Ukraine’s parliament.
Back in 2008, two lawmakers left the pro-Western coalition of the Our Ukraine and Batkivshchyna parties, which led to its collapse. In 2010, when Yanukovych won the presidency but faced an oppositional parliament, more than 30 lawmakers changed their party affiliation and joined the pro-government coalition. Their critics said they had been bribed.
Now the parties are allowed to eject lawmakers who officially leave their faction from parliament. But they have no such influence on lawmakers elected in single-member districts, who make up just over half of Zelensky’s party in parliament — 130 out of 254 members.
Risk and response
Zelensky’s party leaders promise to use “carrots and sticks” to build party discipline, but they don’t elaborate on what that will mean in practice. Among their first actions, they promise to submit a draft law to parliament stripping lawmakers of parliament immunity and punishing them for voting in place of other lawmakers or missing parliament sessions.
Political analyst Volodymyr Fesenko said the party might also initiate the law that would expel from the parliament the lawmakers elected from the party in single-member districts if they leave the party faction.
“But this would require changes in Constitution so they would have to find 300 votes to support it,” he said.
But it’s unclear how party leaders could discourage their lawmakers from voting differently than the rest of the party, either because of their honest beliefs or because they were paid money to do so.
Runaway lawmaker Oleksandr Onyshchenko has claimed he paid lawmakers from $20,000 to $100,000 for a vote in the previous parliament, bribing them on behalf of Poroshenko and his party. Poroshenko denied that.
Meanwhile, the future lawmakers from Zelensky’s party are largely using their training for networking.
Arakhamiya said that, as of July 29, he knew more than 70 of his colleagues in parliament and tried to introduce himself to another two or three people every day and have lunch or dinner with them.
Oleksandr Dubinsky, an anchor on the 1+1 TV channel who was elected from the Servant of the People party in district No. 94 in Kyiv Oblast, looks at a camera as he listens to a trainer during the express course in Truskavets on July 29. (Oleg Petrasiuk)
Oleksandr Dubinsky, 38, an anchor on the 1+1 TV channel who was elected in district No. 94 in Kyiv Oblast, where he defeated influential Poroshenko ally and lawmaker Ihor Kononenko, did separate networking. On July 30, he announced that he and four other colleagues elected from single-member districts had decided to create an informal group in the Servant of the People faction that they plan to call “Justice.”
Dubinsky later said in his video blog that he is doing this for his voters, and not to split the party faction. But many saw it as an attempt to create a group of influence of Kolomosky in Zelensky’s party faction. The 1+1 channel, where Dubinsky works, is owned by Kolomoisky. One more member of the group, Olga Vasylevska-Smahliuk, is also a journalist on this TV channel.
“Wherever there is Dubinsky, there is also Kolomoisky,” Fesenko said. Dubinsky didn’t respond to the request for comment. Vasylevska-Smahliuk denied Kolomoisky’s influence on this group.
